Florida’s Persistent Unemployment

The St. Pete Times weighs in with a list of factors that put Florida a full 2.6 percent higher when compared with the national unemployment average.

Burying the lede, of course, with this:

There are two types of unemployment: Cyclical unemployment refers to jobless in industries that ebb and flow based on economic conditions — like real estate sales. Structural unemployment refers to jobless who worked in professions or trades that are being phased out or offshored and not expected to return — like certain manufacturing jobs made obsolete by technology.

And they go on to say, for construction workers over a certain age, or who have been unemployed for a certain amount of time, they will probably never work again in that industry.

“You’ve created a whole new level of people who are structurally unemployed who before were cyclical.”

It started with a flood of un-educated workers came to Florida to build homes and commercial real estate and now the state is flush with property. And now well-off Floridians don’t want to pay property taxes, the main way our state government receives funding. The problem with putting an unskilled labor force back to work in a technocratic economy will remain insurmountable, so long as we view construction as an acceptable way out of this recession. A way which, trust-you-me, would lead us right back down into another recession, a boom-bust-boom-bust-etc. cycle favored by Greatest Asshole in the Universe Alan Greenspan.